Got a whole heap of apache errors before :S

Yes, for about two hours.

So what percentage is our '99.9%' actually making now, any idea?

You make it sound like I should bother with Teh Backup forum

Well it is at least useful as an "is it just me" test, even if you don't want to actually post anything there.

We had a database crash is what happened.

To make matters worse we were also /.'d Googlebot'd quite severely. Every time the database fell over and I repaired it and bought it back online, the first "person" online was Google.com.

He seems to have stopped visiting at the moment, hopefully he won't do it again for a while.

robots.txt is your friend

We want Google to index us though don't we?

And robots.txt doesn't allow us to control things like frequency of visits and number of visits per day.

What, even if it brings down the server? Your call, I guess.
No, but it does allow you to prevent directories from being crawled, so the main domain could be indexed, but not the forum. Unless the point is to have a search for 'teh forum' or 'beehive' return every last jibbering post from us lot, in which case my bad. :><

I agree with Truff. Being indexed by google doesn't seem worth not having access to this place for one in three days or whatever.

(I'm talking specifically about teh not beehive in general, I realise it's something you'll probably want to iron out in the code if the problem is there)

I've never used google to search this place (have other people done that much?) and we've not (as far as I know) attracted any new users through google so...

'teh' is acutally the live test forum for beehive, always has been, and that's why we sometimes have glitchy bits, but (I'd suggest) it's better to sort out whatever google is doing so that beehive works better rather than just turn it off and ignore it?

note: the above is written from the perspective of someone who wouldn't have a clue where to begin

I accept that first bit for sure. We accept a bit of glitchiness so matt can do his thing. But it's gone a bit beyond that lately.

But... what benefit to we at teh actually get from being indexed by google? If lots of people use it often to search the forum then fair enough, but otherwise it seems to have no upside (other than in the abstract).

I don't think we at 'teh' get any benefit at all, this isn't the sort of forum that needs to be searchable, but others will need it and this is the only sensible place to test stuff and see what breaks

Aye, that's fair enough if that is the case.

there seems to be a couple of new users per week signing up on average.. dunno where they come from but it might be google!

But they don't seem to post :(

The downtime yesterday evening was because someone switched off Apache and MySQL. I have no way of knowing who it was, but there are only 3 of us that can do it, those being Pete and myself and EuroVPS. I know it wasn't me and I suspect it wasn't Pete either.

(Google = all search engines)

Google's indexing is not taking down the forum and neither is the point of the indexing to allow people to use Google to search here, it's simply so we appear in Google's search results.

If anyone has been paying attention to the number of visitors lately you all should have noticed that it has risen quite dramatically above the usual 10 registered users and 1 or 2 guests. We're now getting 20+ Guests browsing at times. This wouldn't be too bad normally, but because Apache is restricted to 10 concurrent connections when these 30 people turn up at once, 20 of them have to wait in line. The only way this can be made better is to add more RAM and allow Apache to accept more connections.

In retrospect when we changed servers last year we probably should have gone for the better server with more RAM and paid more for it, rather than side-grade like we did.

I'll be the first to admit Beehive probably isn't the best optimised forum software out there, but baring in mind it's feature set, it's certainly a lot better than it ever used to be. The memory footprint could probably be looked at, but I'm not sure if that is something that can be solved easily in code or if it's something that needs changing in the PHP configuration.

this is true. Useless people.

Heh, I was going to ask you about that - definitely wasn't me, and I suspected it not being you also, but wanted to check if it was definitely a manual shutdown?


With regards to the optimisation side of things... is there any kind of profiling software for PHP that can identify potential bottlenecks?
Certainly for MySQL it's possible to do Query Execution Plans and look at indexes and so on, but that generally takes more time to identify/narrow where to look at.


Possibly related... have you looked into the WatchDog software that Plesk has? Wondering if that just looks at 'normal' things, or if it is capable of going more in-depth and logging slow scripts/etc...